The Victorian obsession with air quality saw the beard promoted as a sort of filter. A thick beard, it was reasoned, would capture the impurities before they could get inside the body. Others saw it as a means of relaxing the throat, especially for those whose work involved public speaking. Some doctors were even recommending that men grew [sic] beards to avoid sorethroats.

As BI’s Lauren Friedman points out, this may have been exactly wrong: Researchers think beards might actually be hairy old infection-trappers, perfect for breeding “disease-carrying ectoparasites,” as one recent study putit.